Insula

Insula drives a pan, tilt and zoom camera. It can sweep the yard on its own, or follow one person the moment you point at them.

• Scout and lockThe camera sweeps until it finds someone, then locks on. If it loses them for 30 seconds it goes back to scouting.
• Tap to followTap a person on the live picture and the camera pans, tilts and zooms to keep them framed. Tap anywhere else and it centres that point.
• Drag to zoomDraw a box on the picture and the lens goes there. Pinching works too.
• Face framingIn People mode a face takes 22 % of the frame height, and a person who is moving keeps at least 1 m of margin around them.
• Auto-track modesOff, People, Vehicles or Plates. Multi follows people or vehicles, whichever is there, and sends vehicles on a hunt for their plate.
• PresetsSave the current view to a slot, then tap its name to go back there.

Faces are compared against a gallery, using the top three scores. On real footage the best impostor scored 0.33 and the median genuine match scored 0.72, so the threshold has a wide gap to sit in.

• Unknown facesA face it has never seen is flagged as soon as it appears and gets its own group, built up photo by photo.
• HouseholdTrain a face to give it a name. When the camera recognises someone who lives there looking at it, it plays their own small gesture: a nod, a wiggle or a circle.
• Plates and vehiclesInsula reads number plates, parked cars included, and describes the vehicles whose plate it cannot read by colour and likely model.
• Ignored regionsDetections whose centre falls inside an ignored region are dropped before tracking. A vehicles-only region still lets people in front of it through.

Walk a zone and the camera follows your footsteps to draw it, or click its corners on the picture. Each zone can be armed on a schedule.

A person whose feet are inside an armed zone counts as occupied: Insula records an event and sets a HomeKit sensor, so the rest of the house can react. On a desktop, a notification arrives with a live snapshot from the camera.

With privacy mode on, Insula keeps no pictures of events. Names, plates, times and recognition still work, because face fingerprints are computed in memory and never written out as images.

With privacy off, snapshots are kept for a number of days that you choose, and the records stay after the pictures are gone. Stored event images can be deleted in one step.

Insula is in preview and free. To try it, or to report a fault, email hello@caissonai.co.

• What is Insula?Insula, also called camOS, is a camera system from Caisson AI. It pans, tilts and zooms to follow a person, flags faces it has never seen, reads number plates and raises an event when someone steps into an armed zone.
• Is Insula free?Yes. Insula is in preview and, like every Caisson product, it is free.
• How does Insula follow a person?Tap a person on the live picture and the camera pans, tilts and zooms to keep them framed. In People mode a face takes 22 % of the frame height, and a person who is moving keeps at least 1 m of margin.
• How does Insula recognise faces?It compares a face with its gallery and uses the top three scores. Measured on real footage, the best impostor scored 0.33 and the median genuine match scored 0.72. Faces it has never seen are grouped by similarity, one group per stranger.
• What is Insula privacy mode?With privacy mode on, Insula keeps no pictures of events. Names, plates, times and recognition still work, because face fingerprints are computed in memory.
• How do Insula zones work?Walk a zone and the camera follows your footsteps to draw it, or click its corners on the picture. A person whose feet are inside an armed zone raises an event and sets a HomeKit sensor.